The invention relates to managing data traffic on multiple ports.
Data traffic sources, such as servers, are typically connected to a network by one or more input/output ports or network adapters, such as network interface cards (NICs). Bottlenecks or failures of a traffic source that reduce its data output rate can hamper the productivity of users of the network.
Multiple network adapters may be installed on the server to share the data traffic load using so-called adaptive load balancing (ALB) or asymmetric port aggregation. Incoming data traffic may be received over one network adapter while the flow of outgoing data traffic is balanced across multiple network adapters so that the data output rate of the server is not limited by the capacity of a single network adapter. If a failure or bottleneck develops on one network adapter, data traffic may be re-routed to the others. For example, server with four network adapters may output data at four times the rate it could with only one adapter, assuming that data traffic is evenly distributed among the four network adapters. If, however, one of the four adapters carries half the data traffic, then the server's output rate is improved by a factor of only two.
Current ALB techniques monitor the average traffic flow rate of data packets from the server when balancing data traffic among multiple network adapters. Both the size of data packets (in bytes) and the time interval between the transmission of consecutive data packets varies. The existence of non-steady traffic rates, traffic bursts, and the variability of packet sizes also must be considered to achieve optimal load balancing.